Question: What is the link between a ghost town on the remote South Atlantic island of South Georgia and the transformation of digital communications?

Part of the answer can be found in a book that is unlikely to be required reading for students of digital communications.   ‘Full Circle’ by Dame Ellen MacArthur has obvious appeal for those of us addicted to offshore sailing. It charts her extraordinary achievements competing alone in the harshest of environments but it also takes us on her voyage away from competitive global sailing towards an even greater challenge.

One of the triggers for Dame Ellen’s new journey was a visit to South Georgia, 700 miles south of The Falklands – a place previously only known to her as a navigation mark when heading homewards after rounding the notorious Cape Horn. This time, arriving after a voyage from The Falklands, she got to see Mount MacArthur and spent time filming with a wildlife project studying the amazing life of the Southern Ocean’s giant birds, the Albatross.

But what struck home most in Ellen’s mind was the ghost town of Grytviken – once a major whaling station but abandoned in the 1950’s. The whaling industry, on whose oil the UK had once been dependent, had arrived in South Georgia in 1904. It employed at one time 4,500 people, had created a town community and was now rusting into dereliction – a cycle of exploitation of natural resources that had completed its course in the lifetime of one person.

It was a big step from that moment of understanding to the creation of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and its mission statement ‘Re-Think the Future’. Along the way all sorts of baggage needed to be re-purposed to give force and directness to messages that previously had been clouded by the academic eco-jargon of ‘sustainability’. Getting the message across requires clarity of communication and a positive approach. There is no point in appealing to young people to make do with less – not least because their parents bear most responsibility for not thinking ahead. As Ellen says, “It’s time to make the future”.

The greater part of ‘rethinking the future’ is about attitude – and some parts of our economic infrastructure have a major role in enabling those attitudes to change. In opening up new opportunities to make the future, very much like changing our approach to energy provision, the drive for digital communications is about ‘fitness for purpose’.

The fitness message is very gradually crawling into the consciousness of the communications industry and its regulators. Ofcom’s recent research report on the benefits of broadband for older people even manages to acknowledge the capacity implications of multiple services operating concurrently within the household. The tag ‘Superfast Broadband’ may appeal to headline writers but ‘Superfit Fibre’ is a more meaningful description. It could focus attention away from contentious download speeds and, more usefully, towards how all-optical access networks can be designed to enable the fullest realisation of new capabilities.

Another recent report, Arthur D Little’s ‘FTTH: Double Squeeze on Incumbents’, does indeed show how. Across Europe, independent access network providers have taken the lead in providing new networks with radical benefits for businesses and consumers – way beyond the half-hearted and protective positioning of traditional providers. To these new forces the switchover from last generation copper to totally transformative fibre is not an upgrade or an evolutionary step but a rethink along completely different lines.

So, thanks to Dame Ellen MacArthur’s inspirational journey, and thanks to innovative ‘Open Access’ FTTH pioneers in continental Europe, the chances of our next generation being enabled to ‘Re-Think the Future’ are immeasurably improved.

Not an easy journey. Not a quick fix. Not something we can afford to ignore.

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Readers of this editorial also read: 'This is not an Upgrade' and 'Searching for Economic Growth Hormones'.